Ozon layers.

With his two latest films opening at once, out director Francois Ozon discusses putting his life in his movies

"It is 100% heterosexual. That's OK?" Handsome Paris-based director Francois Ozon is laughing. "In France you are a director first. People don't care if you are gay or heterosexual. But each time I go to America, people tell me, `You're gay, you're gay.' Nobody does that in France."

"It" is Ozon's work in progress, Sous le Sable (Under the Sand). Taking an editing break from that film, he fled south to Cannes to promote two previous movies, each of which has a high percentage of "homo": Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Zeitgeist), opening July 12, and Criminal Lovers (Strand Releasing), opening July 21.

Our interview, amid the chaos of the Cannes Film Festival, has been carefully orchestrated by a bevy of handlers, and Ozon, 32, looks the pro in curved shades, a gray linen shirt, dirty jeans, and black suede lace-ups. Two hours later we run into each other on the beach: I'm in a restaurant, fully clothed; he is bronzed, lying on a chaise on the sand, in pink bathing trunks. We burst out laughing. So much for keeping things formal.

That the man in the pink swimsuit can make a "100% heterosexual" film represents a maturing process, he tells me. "In my first films I talked about my own life," Ozon explains, referring to his bold, gay-themed movies such as A Summer Dress, See the Sea, and Sitcom. "They were aggressive. I think now I can make films less destructive. I've changed. I can go somewhere else."

That place is Under the Sand (staring Charlotte Rampling), which deals not with sexual orientation but with the problems of women over 50. But Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks fall into something of an Ozonian limbo, each with a young male hero who is either bisexual or going through a homosexual phase. Ozon wrote Criminal Lovers himself, inspired by a newspaper crime story, while Water Drops adapts a never-produced play by the late German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, it touched Ozon so personally, he says, that he decided to toss out his own script encompassing the same basic issues: servitude, sexual power, and abuse.

Shot in a consciously theatrical style, Water Drops focuses on straight teen Franz (Malik Zidi), who allows himself to be seduced, then kept--imprisoned, really--by the much older, sexually powerful businessman Leopold (Bernard Giraudeau). Franz's ex-girlfriend Anna (Ludivine Sagnier) comes to take Franz back, but she finds herself also caught in the clutches of the magnetic Leopold.

Even though it's Fassbinder's story, "for me, it's autobiographical," says Ozon. "I think I was Franz when I was 18. I was in love, with a lot of passion, but was manipulated--and I didn't like the man as a person. It was very hard for me to be in love, with that contradiction. It was masochistic on my part."

In Criminal Lovers--part Bonnie and Clyde, part Badlands, part Brothers Grimm, but all Ozon--young Alice (Natacha Regnier) pushes her high school boyfriend Luc (Jeremie Renier) to murder a sexy Arab student. On the lam, the two end up in a magical forest, in the clutches of a solitary man known only as the Woodsman. He locks the teens in his cellar but brings Luc up for occasional lessons in the art of same-sex lovemaking--right where Alice can see it all.

Regarding Lovers, Ozon connects more with the girl who got the pair into trouble in the first place. "I'm not naive anymore," he says. "I don't judge Alice. She's like a director--she manipulates everybody; she has a script in her head. She channels her desire by creating a fantasy about the Arab guy. There are a lot of Arabs in France and a lot of racism. She can't admit her attraction."

And how does Ozon--who says "I am alone and prefer to be alone"--channel his libidinal energy? He giggles. "I live out my desire making films."

For more on Fracois Ozon and his film, go to www.advocate.com

Feinstein contributes to Detour and London's The Guardian.